What’s on today’s agenda? White Hall High School’s schedule is constantly changing and can be difficult for students to remember. Sophomore John Smith decided to solve this timely problem by creating a scheduling tool on his self-engineered website, www.example.com. John utilized PHP, the ubiquitous front-end web programming language, to create an automatically updated, real-time schedule. Students and even teachers can create an account on John’s site and peruse the current day’s agenda, as well tomorrow’s upcoming schedule. We recently sat down with John to ask him about the scheduling project.

US: When did you start this project, and why?

JS: [I started] sometime last year. I’ve built upon it way more than is probably healthy, but boredom and laziness can only go so far. The constant sifting through my backpack to get my schedule was getting old really quickly, and I felt like it was distracting and disrespectful to the teachers. At the time I was just starting to learn PHP, so I figured I’d use that to write a schedule that changes according to each day. It spiraled out of control and has yet to achieve its tragic crash, landing on the side of some volcano in a rainforest somewhere. For some reason, this project won’t die like the others.

US: Do you receive a lot of visits to your webpage?

JS: Yesterday I received over 200 hits. Of course, hits wax and wane; I get more hits during a new semester, when people still aren’t used to their schedules.

Not surprisingly, John plans on majoring in Computer Science at FullSail, UCF, FSU, FIT, or RIT. “I probably won’t major in web development. That has always been more of a hobby, but I wouldn’t mind doing it for a living and would definitely consider transferring majors to web development if computer science isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” John reasoned.

To program your own schedule, click here to visit John’s site.